A100users Place

About Me

I have been a keen experimenter in sound for 35 years having received my first tape machine aged 12. This led to experiments in field and binaural recording and various forms of sound editing and synthesis.
I has composed for various gallery installations and lectured on synthesis.
These days I can be found coaxing noises from my modular synthesisers just because it's fun.
When not in my studio I prefer to be outdoors.
To keep fit I play Airsoft and I'm field archer.

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

Well it's happened. Having outgrown my temporary Blue case I comissioned Ross Lamond at Lamond Designto build be a new one. After many drawings I came up with the following template to be built in Ash.

The case would have four 16 frac wide boats fitted with an external 3.4A Power One supply.

Ross put together a mock up for me and here it is - very exciting times.

I have most of the components to complete the build so next installment soon.

I have been so busy in the various facets of life I have forgotten to keep this Blog up to date and there is so much to tell.

Let's start with an update in the modular world

I have finally finished and populated the Euro system in to it's new home the Halliburton Case.

With a ton of help from Monobass over at http://www.muffwiggler.com with the rails and all the metal work, advice from Ross Lamond for sourcing the power supplies I finally got it running.

Took it and the BugBrand modular to Coventry for a meet up with fellow Wigglers and here they are:

I'll post more about the Coventry meeting later.

Looking at that picture reminds me that the aforementioned Ross http://www.lamonddesign.co.uk/ is a wizard with wood and I have designed a new case for the BugBrand modular that Ross is building for me. The new case, which not only will it be sexy to look at but will also offer me a fourth row to house the few spare modules that can't fit in the existing case but also room for new modules, with luck it'll be ready mid December.

Friday, 30 September 2011

I have a problem with space, more modules than my original Bug case can handle!

Now I have drawn up plans for my new Bug case - curvy and organic - but after a couple of failed prototypes due to lack of materials I found being capable of being curved to the radius' needed I have got to a crunch point that is no longer acceptable, i.e. having modules I can't use

So I have started a temp case and here it is so far:

It'll use the same rails, PSU and other ideas planned for the final case so at least I can try ideas out as well has have enough real estate for expansion.

So it's now drilled and filled, rails (with sliding nuts - not making that mistake again), common earth point, primed and first coat of colour.

As you can see in the second picture I was a tad over enthusiastic with the spray and it ran

Hopefully I'll sand and second coat next weekend and then start the electrics and the finishing touches.

Finished the second coat of paint after a good rub down - not a perfect finish by any stretch but I need my Bug back - and sprayed the antennae (a bug isn't a BUG without them).

Added some rubber feet. Fitted the USB sockets, power rails, connected up the PSU, flipped the switch and at last some power

Still some more work to do; branding, blank panels etc but I did a quick populate to see how it looks - then promptly lost a few hours having a play.

It's getting there.

Quite happy with the USB lights, both for a fiver off Ebay and a bit of spray paint.

I think the reason I spent a bit of effort here was trying out things and leaning what works and what doesn't. For example I'd already drilled the holes for the USB sockets before receiving the nice new longer buss boards from Tom and then realising that I'd compromised the space for mounting the buss, hence it being placed on edge for the top rail. Also I only inserted enough sliding nuts for the max number of frac widths the case can hold. Then when doing the first module install realised that two nuts in the top row (same rail) are rubbish thread wise - I was just taking these new nuts and sliding them in and not checking if they were 100% before - so I'm short a nut or two and because the rail mounts are filled and painted I can't add more so will need to cut a slot in the rail to insert extra ones. It's these little things that go into the database of don't do that again.